The 12-page document circulated to the other 46 member states of the Council of Europe is intended to cut the backlog of cases waiting to be heard at Strasbourg and empower national courts.

Britain currently holds the council's chair and has embarked on a diplomatic offensive to galvanise support for far-reaching reform of the court.

[...]

The paper, titled High Level Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights, will be debated at an international conference in Brighton in April at the end of the UK's six-month term of office.Some details have not been finalised and alternative options are included in certain sections.

It has not been released to parliament but follows along broad lines set out by David Cameron.

The content may nonetheless alarm civil liberties groups who fear that international standards could be diluted in favour of allowing individual states greater leeway on sensitive human rights issues.

The document argues for expanding what is known as the "margin of appreciation", the way in which states may choose how to implement the different articles of the European convention on human rights.

It states: "The principles of subsidiarity and the margin of appreciation should be enhanced by their express inclusion in the convention." It suggests that the "necessary amending instrument" should be endorsed within a year.

Support Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, and Birgitta Jonsdottir in suing the United States Government
to stop the implementation of the NDAA - It's set to take effect on
March 1, 2012 and we want to sign up as many grassroots supporters as
possible before then.

February272012

“

[...]

American officials have traditionally viewed the World Bank as an extension of United States foreign policy and commercial interests. With the Bank just two blocks away from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, it has been all too easy for the US to dominate the institution. Now many members, including Brazil, China, India, and several African countries, are raising their voices in support of more collegial leadership and an improved strategy that works for all.

From the Bank’s establishment until today, the unwritten rule has been that the US government simply designates each new president: all 11 have been Americans, and not a single one has been an expert in economic development, the Bank’s core responsibility, or had a career in fighting poverty or promoting environmental sustainability. Instead, the US has selected Wall Street bankers and politicians, presumably to ensure that the Bank’s policies are suitably friendly to US commercial and political interests.

Yet the policy is backfiring on the US and badly hurting the world. Because of a long-standing lack of strategic expertise at the top, the Bank has lacked a clear direction. Many projects have catered to US corporate interests rather than to sustainable development. The Bank has cut a lot of ribbons on development projects, but has solved far too few global problems.

For too long, the Bank’s leadership has imposed US concepts that are often utterly inappropriate for the poorest countries and their poorest people. For example, the Bank completely fumbled the exploding pandemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria during the 1990’s, failing to get help to where it was needed to curb these outbreaks and save millions of lives.

Even worse, the Bank advocated user fees and “cost recovery” for health services, thereby putting life-saving health care beyond the reach of the poorest of the poor – precisely those most in need of it. In 2000, at the Durban AIDS Summit, I recommended a new “Global Fund” to fight these diseases, precisely on the grounds that the World Bank was not doing its job. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria emerged, and has since saved millions of lives, with malaria deaths in Africa alone falling by at least 30%.

The Bank similarly missed crucial opportunities to support smallholder subsistence farmers and to promote integrated rural development more generally in impoverished rural communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For around 20 years, roughly from 1985 to 2005, the Bank resisted the well-proven use of targeted support for small landholders to enable impoverished subsistence farmers to improve yields and break out of poverty. More recently, the Bank has increased its support for smallholders, but there is still far more that it can and should do.

February192012

Abstract: What is education for democracy? We urgently need to
reflect about this, since radical changes in education are occurring
without much public deliberation. Narrowly focusing on national economic
gain, nations, and their systems of education, are needlessly
discarding skills associated with the humanities and the arts, that are
needed to keep democracies alive: the ability to think critically; the
ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a
"citizen of the world"; and the ability to imagine sympathetically the
predicament of another person.

Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and
Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and
Divinity School. She is an Associate in the Classics Department and the
Political Science Department, a Member of the Committee on Southern
Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She is
the founder and Coordinator of the Center for Comparative
Constitutionalism.

Her publications include the recently released From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010), Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011). Her current book in progress is Political Emotions: The Public Psychology of a Decent Society.

– Page 6: The drone lobbyists take full credit for authoring
the expansion of domestic drone use codified in the FAA authorization
bill passed last week, noting “the only changes made to the UAS section of the House FAA bill were made at the request of AUVSI. Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word.”

– Pages 10-12: The drone industry eagerly anticipates that
civil drone use, including use of drones for “suspect tracking” by law
enforcement, will soon eclipse military use of drones. Under a section
called “Challenges facing UAS,” the lobbyists listed “Civil Liberties.”